Page 14 - ALG Issue 4 2019
P. 14

artists corner
    ‘The Allotments’ Exhibition at
the Victoria Gallery & Museum
LOOK PHOTO BIENNIAL, LIVERPOOL 29 AUGUST – 28 SEPTEMBER 2019
Words scatter like seeds along sentences of soil – a harvest of song.
Eye to eye sunlight
trapped in a box of shadows, men fixed in square frames.
The artist transforms
white intervals of snowfall – still life in colour.
‘The Allotments’, an exhibition at Liverpool’s Victoria Gallery & Museum (Aug – Sept 2019), part of Open
Eye Gallery’s LOOK Photo Biennial, celebrated Dingle Vale Allotments through portrait and landscape photographs, paintings, interviews, poems and reflections. This is an ongoing project between photographic artist David Lockwood (also an allotment holder), writer Pauline Rowe and the allotment holders themselves.
The exhibition offered artistic studies and explorations of people and nature in the city through a community that reflects social change, hard work, diversity and knowledge. There were
a number of extracts from interviews displayed with black and white portraits. One of the longest serving tenants, Billy, says: “I look forward to looking after my dahlias. When I used to show, I grew the lot; giants right down to the pom-poms. They have lovely colours and shapes, the giants, medium semi-cactus, medium decs, small cactus, ball dahlias, pom-poms... I love the dahlia. I get here every day
in the summer... I’ve been coming down here since I was eleven with my granddad. I’ve had my own piece of ground for 60 years (I’m now 82) ... My granddad had his plot for 37 years. He was a dahlia grower too.”
I love the dahlia. I get here every day in the summer... I’ve been coming down here since I was eleven with my granddad
           The exhibition includes paintings by David’s father, industrial landscape painter Arthur Lockwood, who died in the summer aged 85. As this was his final project, his studies for planned work were included in the exhibition.
Pauline Rowe said: “ ’The Allotments’ provided me with an exciting challenge to devise new writing that can work with these astonishing photographs and distinctive paintings, as well as reflect the integrity of the place. It has also offered a wide range of subjects to us as artists from human studies and seasonal change to the art of growing and human grief.”
  14 Allotment and Leisure Gardener

















































































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